Search Results for: Felix Salmon
How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution

Ian Bogost | from The Geek’s Chihuahua | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 22 minutes (5,539 words)
The following is an excerpt from Ian Bogost’s book The Geek’s Chihuahua, which addresses “the modern love affair of ‘living with Apple’ during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance,” and how smartphones created a phenomenon of “hyperemployment.”
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Think back to 2007, when you got the first iPhone. (You did get one, didn’t you? Of course you did.) You don’t need me to remind you that it was a shiny object of impressive design, slick in hand and light in pocket. Its screen was bright and its many animations produced endless, silent “oohs” even as they became quickly familiar. Accelerometer-triggered rotations, cell tower triangulations (the first model didn’t have GPS yet), and seamless cellular/WiFi data transitions invoked strong levels of welcome magic. These were all novelties once, and not that long ago.
What you probably don’t remember: that first iPhone was also terrible. Practically unusable, really, for the ordinary barrage of phone calls, text messages, mobile email, and web browsing that earlier smartphones had made portable. And not for the reasons we feared before getting our hands on one—typing without tactile feedback wasn’t as hard to get used to as BlackBerry and Treo road warriors had feared, even if it still required a deliberate transition from t9 or mini-keyboard devices—but rather because the device software was pushing the limits of what affordable hardware could handle at the time.
Applications loaded incredibly slowly. Pulling up a number or composing an email by contact name was best begun before ordering a latte or watering a urinal to account for the ensuing delay. Cellular telephone reception was far inferior to other devices available at the time, and regaining a lost signal frequently required an antenna or power cycle. Wireless data reception was poor and slow, and the device’s ability to handle passing in and out of what coverage it might find was limited. Tasks interrupted by coverage losses, such as email sends in progress, frequently failed completely.
The software was barebones. There was no App Store in those early days, making the iPhone’s operating system a self-contained affair, a ladleful of Apple-apportioned software gruel, the same for everyone. That it worked at all was a miracle, but our expectations had been set high by decades of complex, adept desktop software. By comparison, the iPhone’s apps were barebones. The Mail application, for example, borrowed none of its desktop cousin’s elegant color-coded, threaded summary view but instead demanded inexplicable click-touches back and forward from folder to folder, mailbox to mailbox. Read more…
The Problem with Journalism and the Internet, in One Quote

Jonah Peretti: I think there’s an interesting tension between what’s good for the user and what’s good for the industry. That was really created by Google. Say The New Yorker writes a really long 12,000 word piece on Scientology. That takes lots of reporting and lots of investment. That’s important work that our industry should embrace and should find ways of supporting economically.
The average person who hears about that story doesn’t want to read the whole story. They’re at work, most likely. They do a Google search because they’ve heard about this Scientology scoop or long form piece. Their first result is the HuffPost link, not a New Yorker link. They look at it. It summarizes what the article is about. It says, “Here’s what was in it, here’s what was notable about it.” Has a few tweets from people. This is how people are reacting to it, and if you want to read it, here’s a link and you can go read the article.
The problem with that example is that from the perspective of the user, it’s a better experience to land on the summary, to see a little bit of the reactions, and have the option of reading it, because that’s as much as most people want. From the perspective of the industry, it would make much more sense for people to go to The New Yorker article so that they get the traffic, as modest as that ad revenue would be, they get the traffic and they get the people onto their site. There is some conflict between Google saying, “Well we want to serve the consumer,” and sending people to the article that the consumer likes the best. Or is Google supposed to send people to the article that costs the most to produce and supports the industry the most? Does that make sense? There is a little bit of a conflict, or a little bit of a tension.
–BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, in a long interview with Felix Salmon, on the past, present and future of media.
The Problem with the Red Cross
Why the Red Cross hasn’t been as effective as small community groups when it has come to disaster relief post-Sandy:
The real problem with the Red Cross was not that it was stretched thin, but rather that it was simply too big, and its people too inexperienced in disaster recovery, to be able to respond nimbly to Sandy. Eventually, after a week or two, it will lumber in to affected areas and take over from the ad-hoc groups who provided desperately-needed aid in the early days. It’s reasonably good at that. But that’s clearly not good enough, and it’s certainly nowhere near flawless.
Of course, the Red Cross is burdened with massive expectations. If you’re stuck in a remote part of Staten Island without power or communication for days on end, no one’s going to blame Doctors Without Borders or Occupy Wall Street if you get no help — but they are going to blame the Red Cross.
With $117 million in donations comes an expectation that the Red Cross can and should be everywhere it’s needed, when it’s needed, rather than in a handful of places, a week later, offering food but no shelter or blankets or power or lights. But probably those expectations are unrealistic. The US is fortunate in that it’s not a permanent disaster zone: it’s not a country where Red Cross volunteers are ever going to be experienced in responding to such things. And mobilizing thousands of volunteers and tens of millions of dollars to provide food and shelter in areas without electricity or pharmacies or heat — that’s a logistical nightmare.
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Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street
“The kind of trading strategies our system uses are not the kind of strategies that humans use,” Kharitonov continues. “We’re not competing with humans, because when you’re trading thousands of stocks simultaneously, trying to capture very, very small changes, the human brain is just not good at that. We’re playing on a different field, trying to exploit effects that are too complex for the human brain. They require you to look at hundreds of thousands of things simultaneously and to be trading a little bit of each stock. Humans just can’t do that.”
By Felix Salmon and Jon Stokes, Wired
My Top 10 Business #Longreads of 2010
My Top 10 Business #Longreads of 2010
Round Two with the excellent @BrainPicker. I tried to minimize repeats with this one—stories here from David Carr, Kathryn Schulz, Nicola Twilley, Mike Riggs, Felix Salmon, David Segal, Tony Hsieh, Paul Graham, James Surowiecki and Bryan Urstadt.
Anthony De Rosa: Five Longreads from 2010
With a bit more time on my hands commuting a few stops on the subway, I need some reading material to Instapaper to my iPad. Longreads has been invaluable in providing me with a great selection of really interesting articles. Along the way, there were five particular stories this year that really caught my attention. Without further ado, here are my five favorite longreads of 2010:
1) Is James Franco For Real by Sam Anderson – New York Mag
I’m generally uninterested in celebrity culture but this was a really fun, creative article that is a sort of modern day “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” The author has some interactions with Franco but for the most part Sam Anderson creates a mythology around the actor and his career schizophrenia.
2) The Wrong Man by David Freed – The Atlantic
Amongst all the anti-terror hysteria of 2010 was this story of Dr. Steven Hatfill who was wrongfully accused of being responsible for a series of anthrax attacks in 2001. David Freed recounts in a breezy but detailed story of the entire ordeal.
3) Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup by Richard Morgan – The Awl
Richard Morgan bears his soul about his struggle to make a living as a freelance writer.
4) The New Gawker Media by Felix Salmon – Reuters
There have been so many articles written about Gawker and so few tell us anything we haven’t already read before. Felix puts together perhaps the most comprehensive piece on where Gawker’s been and where it appears to be headed, revealing some odd financial handling using offshore accounts.
5) Probably going to piss off a lot of white people with this one by Matt Langer – Matt Langer’s Tumblr
Tumblr may be better known as a micro-blogging platform but there’s plenty of longform content being produced and Matt Langer provides some of the best. In this piece Langer discusses race, the Shirley Sherrod affair, Andrew Breitbart, and how we are still very far from living in a post-racial America.
The New Gawker Media
The problem with Gawker Media’s current model—and this is true of many other sites, too, including the Huffington Post—is that it’s based on pageviews and those tyrannical CPMs. It’s essentially a junk-mail direct marketing model, which Batty is very comfortable with: watch him talk about how Gawker Media has “massively scaled our ability to deliver consumer activations,” whatever that means.
By Felix Salmon, Reuters
Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story

Ned Stuckey-French | culturefront | 1999 | 21 minutes (5,289 words)
Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.
Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
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Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the firstline critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…
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